Is giving people cash working? Six months of Denver's Basic Income Project

As a general principle: money is not a real thing. It doesn't exist. It's only a symbol, means of accounting. You cannot eat it, you cannot wear it. You cannot fix the poverty by giving everyone money if you do not increase the amount of goods available for purchase in the market at the same time.

Do you mean now? Or under UBI? Or under UBI plus the necessary changes in the tax code to make sure adding more income never puts you in a higher tax bracket that reduces your actual take home income? Even the last wouldn't necessarily make your claim true, since working has costs as well as benefits--paying for your daily commute, for example.

> We can even potentially reduce or eliminate minimum wage

This would be an obvious thing to do if UBI existed, but nobody, to my knowledge, is proposing it, and it would be politically very difficult to achieve even with UBI. Nobody wants to be the one who takes away any perceived benefit.

> an economic future where there are no reasonable opportunities for a growing number of people

To the extent this is an actual problem, the way to fix it is not UBI, but removing the massive number of government regulations that make it extremely difficult to start a small business and be competitive. The idea that we are running out of actual opportunities for productive work--that is, opportunities for making positive sum trades that are not being made now because nobody has yet started the necessary business to enable them--is laughable. Human wants are limitless. But the most cost effective ways to satisfy particular wants do change, and people's expectations of job opportunities do have to change with them.

> What will, for example, ride sharing, food delivery drivers, and truck drivers do when self-driving vehicles eliminate the need for them?

What happened to all the horse carriage drivers, grooms, stable hands, etc., etc. when the automobile made horse transport obsolete?

The answer, of course, is that they went and found different jobs. Some of them found jobs in automobile factories, or became gas station attendants, or worked on road paving crews. But others went to work for new businesses, or started new businesses, doing things that hadn't existed at all before, because there were no people available to do them.

In other words, your implicit mental model, which is that there are a fixed number of jobs and once automation takes some away, no others arise to replace them, is simply wrong.

> Do you believe we have (or will have) jobs to employ the ten-plus million who will be put out of work in the coming decade or two?

Historically, that has always been what happens when a technology change makes a large pool of people available for new work, so yes. The only thing that might put a spoke in the wheel is government regulations preventing people from starting new businesses doing new things to employ those people. See above.

No, I define actions that are dictated from the top down based on collective information (such as population statistics) to be collectivist. Of course not all actions taken by large organizations are collectivist in this sense. Nor are all actions taken by individuals not collectivist in this sense.

> It only takes one individual to ruin a good thing.

A good thing from whose perspective? If everyone in the rural village you describe agrees that something is not a good thing, they should be able to work that out at the individual level. If not everyone agrees, then on what basis are you claiming that it's a bad thing and should be stopped?

Of course individuals take many actions that affect others. But that doesn't mean you need to be "collectivist" to manage that. In the vast majority of actual cases, individual behavior is regulated by individual interactions with other individuals.

> Abuse of monopoly - a fundamentally individualistic behaviour, as I see it

I disagree. If a monopoly exists, you have to first ask where it came from. In the case of health care, it came from government regulation. (In fact, historically, this is almost always where monopolies come from. The original meaning of the term "monopoly" was a royal grant of the exclusive right to sell a particular commodity.) And what was the government regulation based on? Collectivism--a top down dictation of rules based on collective information. So abuse of monopoly is a consequence of collectivism.

Of course the individual people who head the corporations that are taking advantage of these government granted monopolies are acting individually. But there are always individuals who want to abuse power and take advantage of others. The question is not how to get rid of such people but how to limit the damage they can do. And collectivism does not do that--it does the opposite, by doing things like granting such people monopolist positions where their abuses can cost billions or trillions of dollars and affect an entire country, instead of them being limited to only affecting the relatively small number of people they directly interact with.

> You may have individualism as your highest value

I have said no such thing. Individualism is a value, but it is not the only value. Americans also value patriotism, meaning the willingness to make personal sacrifices for the good of the country. We just often disagree with people in other countries about which personal sacrifices are actually worth making for that goal. Our deep suspicion of collectivism is part of that: based on human history, we have a deep distrust of the idea that top-down dictation of rules based on collective information can improve society. We would much rather let individuals work things out by individual, bottom-up interaction, holding each other accountable for the impacts our actions have on others.

> Did you know that the public cost of the US healthcare system per capita vastly exceeds that of every other nation, despite Americans _also_ paying thousands every year in private insurance?

Yes. I just disagree with your contention that this is due to too much individualism. It's not. It's due to too much collectivism. See above.

That's some Keynesian bullshit, supply is constrained by a lot of factors, demand alone can't increase it. And even when it does, the intermediate step is, guess what? Raising prices.

There have been many trials and this is again and again the most stunning conclusion (I doubt this one is even a good example) It is kinda silly how obvious it is in hindsight: A person living on 1 dollar per day will leverage the hell out of 10 cents extra.

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